The Choice
by ObsessivelyOdd
Summary: Alex just wants this to be over, one way or another.


_**A/N: So, I've had this sitting on my computer for a while now, and BlackLightedClouds persuaded me to post it after scolding me for sending her perfectly good one-shots with the drabbles and snippets that she agreed to help me sort through and give opinions on. (Thank you, Clouds, you're a life saver!) So yeah, here you go! Enjoy…**_

_**WARNINGS!: Suicidal thoughts. Language.**_

_**DICLAIMER: As usual, I own nothing that you recognise.**_

-o-O-o-

It's such a small thing. It fits easily into his hand, looking so innocent, so common place. An empty hypodermic syringe, still wrapped in plastic. Unused. Harmless.

And so this is it. Decision time. It would be so easy to do. To unwrap it, pull back the plunger and release it in his vein. To wait, decision made, until the air bubble reaches his heart and causes a heart attack.

Easy enough, he thinks, to hide the syringe here. To throw it away, hidden in the bushes along with a hundred others. Indistinguishable from the ones that hadn't been used to ensure a traceless death. No one would need to know that it had been deliberate. Jack wouldn't feel guilty – what could she do about a heart attack, after all?

He's not scared off death. He's brushed passed it too often for that. What is to be scared of? Death is just nothing. Nothingness. Nothing.

No one is scared of nothingness, he thinks.

What reason does he have to stay? He is not deluded enough to think that no-one would mourn him. Tom and Jack would, at least, and he likes to think a few others might as well, but they would move on. Grieve, and then heal and continue to live their lives without the pain and worry and suffering he brings to them. Free to remember him as they want to, not have to face him as he is.

If he stays here, he'll be MI6's pawn until they have no more use for him, or until he is so de-humanised that they have no more control over him. He's doubtful as to whether they'd even let him go after that, or whether they'd see him as a loose end to tie off, by any means necessary.

But then…

Someone once said, that while there is life, there is hope. And though hope of a normal, happy life away from MI6 is infinitesimally small, it is still there. The only thing that he can be sure of, is that anything can happen. Perhaps Blunt will retire, or be assassinated, or fired, and a new head will take his place, one who won't want a teenaged spy, who sees him as a liability rather than an asset.

So which should he do? Is it braver to end his life now, and to set everyone he cares about free from the shadows that surround him, or to hang on, to fight and live and love, to carry on no matter what the world throws at him? He doesn't know.

For once, he can't tell which is the right path to choose, and which one is just selfish.

But then, everyone always says that killing yourself _is_ selfish. What else could it be, really? So, perhaps he has no way out. If it's selfish to live, it's surely just as selfish to die. He can't do this because of someone else.

Does he want to die? No, he guesses not. No more than he wants to live, at any rate. He has no strong feelings either way. And that scares him, slightly.

But if he doesn't know, then maybe he should wait. He can't come back to life, once dead, but just because he decides against it now, doesn't mean he can't change his mind in the future.

No.

No, he will not take the easy way out. If he lives now, he will not consider this again. He will not take the coward's choice of not deciding. He's been called a lot of things, but a coward isn't one of them.

Would it hurt? Probably. He can't imagine it would be painless. But then, he's no stranger to pain.

Sometimes, it feels like he's failed one too many fucking times to go on.

His record – perfect – is written in black and white and so can't really be argued with, as if the fact that the world is still turning isn't proof enough that he's wrong, but somehow it doesn't help.

Sometimes, he wondered what he failed at. Others, he would wonder what he hadn't failed.

And suddenly, he is incredibly angry. Rage filling him to the brim and overflowing as he clenches his hands into fists and grits his teeth against the urge to scream. That they had driven him to this! That they had taken away everything and left him with this- this _emptiness_. That he couldn't even make this simple choice that most people didn't even have to think about _because of them_.

He just wants it to be over, one way or the other.

-o-O-o-

_**A/N: Reviews are love :) **_


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